Thursday, September 25, 2008

With Mark Kinney and Mags. Send us topic ideas, people! And let us plug your favorite convention, too! Maybe even the return of Dice! Camera! Action!? Mags takes over as the AGC News Director. Brian Thomsen passes. GAMA seeking new Executive Director. Monty Python Fluxx. Ticket to Ride Dice Expansion. Formula D exclusive Porche model in first run. Order of the Stick: War and XPs ships to stores. Ken Hite's Out of the Box back at IPR (with some fan adoration from us). Street date for Monsterpocalypse! GSL still on the way. Reminiscing on other old legal kerfuffles. Wits and Wagers going to Europe and beyond! Reaper suppliment for Talisman! Mistborn RPG! Paul Tevis holds his podcast for ransom. A little talk about Ike. New Dungeon Crawl Classics and the Master Dungeons (with a little bit on the official WotC line). Gaming under adversity. Interview with Lisa Brown from Gamers For Humanity. Secrets and Lies. Mark owns an issue of People magazine with an article about the UK Steve Jackson. Who's going to pay for Dragon/Dungeon? Feedback from Pittsburgh! Thoughts on GMing Consulting. RPG Buffet Extra coming!

2 comments:

Wow, quite a rush to hear you spend so much time on your show on me and my project, and I'm really impressed you remembered it after all this time. Since you spent a few moments on the show and were even kind enough to include a link in your notes, I thought I might offer a little clarification about the Fifth World.

The goal is to make an open source story game, both rules and setting. The rules we put out almost two years ago are horrible, and I've spent the time since then trying to synthesize indie games, story games, and oral, animist cultures to come up with something good. I've recently started the alpha playtest for version 0.3, and it's far enough along that I can definitely say that the public playtest (version 0.4) will begin in November. In fact, I'll be running the very first public game at GASPcon, a local gaming convention in Pittsburgh on November 1st and 2nd. People who follow the link won't find much there yet, I'm afraid. The wiki is almost a place-holder at this point. I've been concentrating on a workable initial offering to get the project started right; there will be a wiki and quite a bit more online once that starts to get underway.

And yes, "yinz" is a close relative of the Appalachian "yunz," and generally works as the plural "you." It's also the most distinctive phrase in a distinctive local dialect called "Pittsburghese." So much so, that you might sometimes hear someone from Pittsburgh called a "Yinzer." And yes, we yinzers have our own "fond" memories of the '93 Blizzard. Ike was even strong when it got this far up the mountains--I had power knocked out for two days, and much of the area went without power for a week. Sure, that's nothing compared to the Gulf coast, but I can't remember the last time a hurricane got to us still that much intact.

I have to be honest - I'm not really in favor of charging money for help GMing. There is just way too much material out there available for free via interwebs. Its like charging people to fill bottles with tapwater. It might save you a little time, perhaps, but anyone can get some bottles and some tapwater and work it out for themselves.

The thing is - and I say this as a game designer and gamer - the roleplaying "industry" just isn't about making money. Its a hobby. You don't charge people to help you with your woodworking or gardening or artwork, and I don't really agree with charging someone for GMing help.

On the other hand, I guess everyone's free to try to make some spare cash however they want. It just doesn't fit with my style and view of the hobby.

In other news - I'll be curious to hear what you guys think of HARP. In my opinion, it's a failure as a book and as a system in a lot of ways, but maybe you'll find a way to have fun with it.